Damaru Lal Bhandari

This is the age of rights. Imagine every Tom, Dick and Harry fighting for rights. Not exactly fighting in the literal sense of the term, though. One could say they are making a living out of the exercise. Which brings us to the issue of why we are not really successful in fighting for our universal rights. It appears that our fight is never ever taken to its logical end. In fact, there is always someone or the other who shoots out from among us and joins the opposite camp. Of course, I am not at all seriously debating this issue here. The real purpose of the piece is quite different as one might learn at the fag end of it.

For the time being one can, however, say that Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba could be the last person to stop the battle going to its logical end. This, however, does not mean I am his sworn enemy. This also does not mean that I am an apologist of Girija Prasad Koirala for that matter. Neither of them is even remotely related to me. Neither of them has ever amused me. Rather they have disappointed me a number of times. It must be said here that the last time Koirala disappointed me was on the day he addressed the nation as an elected prime minister soon after the first election in 1991. He had gone on to promise law and order while I had expected a lot more. Of course, the fact that he could not even meet that is a different thing altogether.

Similarly, the last time Deuba disappointed me was when he went ahead and recommended the dissolution of the House of Representatives in much the same way as Koirala had done once in a huff. But the pressing issue is while these two politicians have been time and again claiming to fight for the rights of the people, they have consistently worked to deny due rights to those they represented. In fact, none of them made it a point to go back to the parliamentary party for a fresh mandate rather than going to the country. Classic cases of rights trampled and denied, these.

Damn the politicians thro-ugh a week, which has far more interesting things unspooling on television sets. Nights have a different meaning now. I sit up well past mid-night to enjoy a sport, which certainly is as entertaining as sexual indulgence can ever be. However, talking about rig-hts, one wonders who would come to the rescue of goalkee-pers as human beings. In fact, they cut a very humiliating figure indeed once the ble-ssed ball whizzes past them to their both exuberance and sh-ock. I wish I could change the rule of the game for the benefit of the goalkeepers of the world.